George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.
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If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
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The greatest thing in life is to die young - but delay it as long as possible.
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The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.
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Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
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The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
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Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
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The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.
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We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
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A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.
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Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.
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In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
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What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
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Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.
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I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
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Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.
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Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
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Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.
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In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
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The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
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That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
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You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
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Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
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There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.